Love Under Constraint: Reading The Materialists Through The Classed Fantasy Of “choosing With The…

Love Under Constraint: Reading The Materialists through the Classed Fantasy of “Choosing with the Heart” in Indonesia

There is a particular disappointment that only comes from wanting to like a film.

Not the casual “meh” you reserve for something forgettable, but the deeper frustration of sitting in a cinema thinking: this should have worked. The premise is there. The politics are there. The moment — culturally, economically, emotionally — is very much there.

This was my experience watching The Materialists, written and directed by Celine Song.

Like many viewers, I came into The Materialists with goodwill. Past Lives had already proven that Song is capable of handling intimacy, loss, and adulthood with restraint. The Materialists promised something equally ambitious: a romance that does not shy away from money, class, and the commodification of love.

And yet, what the film ultimately exposes — perhaps unintentionally — is not just the limits of modern romance, but the limits of who gets to speak about capitalism as a feeling rather than a structure.

Love, but Make It Optional

When Song responded to criticism labeling The Materialists as “broke guy propaganda,” she framed the backlash as a troubling symptom of how capitalism has “colonized our hearts” — how people are now unable to imagine love outside of market logic.

It is, on the surface, a beautiful articulation. Poetic. Intellectually coherent. Very Celine Song.

But it is also, I would argue, a response spoken from relative privilege.

Because for many women, especially outside Western urban middle-class contexts, money is not a moral preference in romance — it is a survival requirement.

This is where the film’s politics start to wobble.

Capitalism Is Not a Theme. It Is a Constraint.

One of the core problems with The Materialists is that it treats capitalism primarily as a symbolic force — something that distorts desire, corrupts intimacy, and seduces us into transactional thinking.

But for many women, capitalism is not something that colonizes the heart.
It is something that closes exits.

In Indonesia, romantic choice is inseparable from:

• unpaid care labor that still overwhelmingly falls on women,
• informal work arrangements with no social protection,
• rising housing costs with stagnant wages,
• family expectations that marriage will function as economic stabilization,
• and the very real risk of being financially dependent if a relationship fails.

Choosing a partner with financial stability is not cynicism.
It is risk management.

To frame this choice as evidence of moral contamination by capitalism — rather than as a rational response to structural inequality — is to misunderstand how deeply uneven romantic freedom actually is.

Intersectionality Is Not a Footnote

Song has cited intersectional feminism in interviews, but intersectionality — as Kimberlé Crenshaw originally articulated it — does not simply ask us to name difference. It asks us to analyze how power distributes risk.(Crenshaw, 1991)

Who can afford to choose love “irrationally”?
Who can recover from choosing wrong?

In Indonesia, women are still more likely to:

• leave the workforce after marriage or childbirth,
• shoulder caregiving responsibilities without compensation,
• lack savings or inheritance as a safety net,
• experience stigma if they return to their parental home after divorce.

Under these conditions, romantic idealism becomes a classed luxury.

This is why the “broke boy propaganda” discourse — while often clumsy and occasionally classist in language — cannot be dismissed outright. For many women, it is not about contempt for poverty. It is about fear of precarity.

When Feminist Media Theory Meets Romantic Fantasy

Liesbet van Zoonen reminds us that media does not merely reflect society; it actively produces gendered meanings through representation (van Zoonen, 2001).

Media texts are polysemic — open to multiple readings — but those readings are always shaped by social position. From this perspective, the audience’s discomfort with The Materialists is not a misreading. It is a negotiated decoding.

Viewers are not rejecting love.
They are rejecting a narrative that frames economic caution as emotional failure.

In The Materialists, Lucy’s final choice is framed as a triumph of authenticity over calculation. But what feels missing is an acknowledgment that calculation itself can be feminist — especially in contexts where women absorb the long-term consequences of romantic decisions more heavily than men.

The Problem with “Nice Rich Men”

Another issue lies in the film’s portrayal of wealth itself.

Harry — the wealthy suitor — exists in an oddly sanitized version of upper-class life. He is kind, emotionally literate, self-aware, and largely unmarked by the moral compromises that usually accompany extreme wealth. His money appears almost accidental, detached from politics, exploitation, or power.

This is where the film’s critique of capitalism weakens.

A genuine capitalist critique would not simply oppose “love vs money.”
It would interrogate how wealth reproduces itself, how power circulates socially, and how class asymmetry shapes intimacy.

By refusing to complicate Harry’s privilege — socially, politically, ideologically — the film turns wealth into an aesthetic rather than a structure.

Romance, Algorithms, and the Marketplace of Feeling

One of The Materialists’ strongest ideas — ironically underdeveloped — is its focus on matchmaking as an industry.

Dating apps and matchmaking services do not merely facilitate connection; they monetize vulnerability. As Nick Couldry argues, contemporary media systems increasingly extract value from everyday life, turning sociality itself into a resource (Couldry, 2012).

In Indonesia, this commodification plays out vividly:

• paid dating platforms promising “serious” matches,
• influencer-driven dating advice framing romance as personal branding,
• algorithms that reward desirability according to narrow, classed aesthetics.

Love becomes less about encounter and more about optimization.

And yet, The Materialists gestures toward this critique without fully committing to it — much like it gestures toward romance without fully delivering it.

Taste, Desire, and Post-Ironic Love

In this social media era, capitalism no longer sells products — it sells feelings of distinction, irony, and self-awareness. Desire becomes performative, filtered through layers of knowing participation.

The Materialists operates within this same post-ironic terrain. It knows romance is compromised. It knows money matters. It knows we know.

But knowing is not the same as accounting for material consequence.

As Curran and Gurevitch remind us, ideology works most effectively when it appears neutral — when power relations are naturalized rather than dramatized (Curran, n.d.). Romantic narratives that frame economic realism as emotional failure risk doing exactly that.

Indonesia, Specifically

What feels particularly off when watching The Materialists from Indonesia is the assumption that love and money exist on separable planes.

Here, marriage is still deeply entangled with:

• family negotiation,
• housing access,
• healthcare security,
• and intergenerational obligation.

Choosing “with the heart” is rarely an individual act.
It is a collective calculation.

To criticize women for factoring in financial stability — without acknowledging these constraints — is not radical. It is, frankly, detached.

Conclusion: Romance Is Not Class-Neutral

The Materialists is not a bad film because it talks about money.
It is disappointing because it talks about money without fully reckoning with power.

Celine Song is right about one thing: capitalism shapes how we love.
But she underestimates how unevenly that shaping occurs.

For some women, love is a space of exploration.
For others, it is a site of risk.

Romantic freedom is not evenly distributed.
Neither is the cost of choosing wrong.

And until our love stories acknowledge that — not as a tragic footnote, but as a central condition — they will continue to feel incomplete.

Not offensive.
Not wrong.

Just… insufficient.

References

Couldry, N. (2012). Media, society, world: Social theory and digital media practice. Polity.

Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color. Stanford Law Review, 43(6), 1241. https://doi.org/10.2307/1229039

Curran, J. (n.d.). Mass media and society.

van Zoonen, L. (2001). Feminist Internet Studies. Feminist Media Studies, 1(1), 67–72. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680770120042864

Love Under Constraint: Reading The Materialists through the Classed Fantasy of “Choosing with the… was originally published in Hello, Love on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.